Based on those promo shots from EW a month or so ago, this seemed like it was going to be laughably bad. Seeing the trailer, I'm going to downgrade that to just 'bad'. Plenty of same beats from the first 2 terminators, which makes this feel more like a retread, especially the one liners. Future John Conner's battle damage looks like they glued some turkey loaf on the actor's face. Still can't comprehend how such an advanced race of machines can't eliminate humans in the future without having to resort to time travel. But old Arnold fighting young Arnold might be worth watching.Who am I kidding, I'll be seeing this on the big screen for sure. Probably with some friends that I saw T2 with, so the nostalgia-meter will be dialed up to 11.

Ha! Great minds. I'll just merge that other thread back into the old one and delete my post.

edit: back on topic....I liked that trailer more than I expected. I think that will be the universal response of anyone who has been following this at all up til now. Is it because the film looks fun or even "good"? Or is it because our expectations were so low? I think it's probably the latter, but, like you and many other dopes, I'm sure I'll go see this in the theater.

I don't mind the retreading somewhat in this case, btw. "I'll be back" and "come with me if you want to live" are kinda required. I just hope the whole story isn't retread. I know they're trying to reset without wholly rebooting via time travel crap (kinda like Star Trek, but maybe less so), but at the end of the day there seems to be a T-1000, Reese, Sarah C and Arnie going at it with the goal of stopping Judgement Day. I've seen that movie before.

Things I got from this:-WTF?-Emilia Clarke is a much hotter brunette than blonde.-I can't stand watching Jai Courtney. I mean the guy no disrespect, but I just can't stand watching him.-Liquid metal Terminator looked more realistic in 1991 (I'm sure they'll polish up the CGI, but man...)-WTF with that plot?!?? -It looks better in trailer form than Part 3 ever did in trailer or as a movie.-WTF?!?!?

Yeah, this looks a bit better than I had assumed. When Sarah opened the door and said "the line" I knew I'd want to see it at some point. Well.... it's also Daenerys Fucking Targaryen saying it, too.

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this whole series has gotten so convoluted at this point. they really just needed to stop after part 2. and that's from someone who kinda even liked part 3 in a way.

yeah, you know you're going to hear "the lines" in this film. but did they really have to blow them in the trailer? BOTH of them? it's kind of like having a SW trailer made up of characters saying "i've got a bad feeling about this." you know you're gonna hear it at some point, but at least part of the fun is seeing how and where they're going to shoehorn that line into the film. putting it in the trailer takes all the fun out of it. maybe it's not as bad as spoiling plot lines, maybe, but considering this movie will either a) have no plot, or b) have a plot so screwy and nonsensical that it may as well not have a plot, putting those lines in the trailer is the next-worst thing.

also, i don't like that jai courtney guy. part of the appeal of michael biehn as reese is that he was a regular guy, not some bohunk beefcake bodybuilder. the juxtaposition of him against the 'roided up schwarzen-android, kinda symbolized the whole man vs. machine theme. making reese just another over-muscled meathead kind of ruins that. also, biehn could act. i'm not so sure you can say the same about courtney.

I had no interest in this, I felt the story reached its logical conclusion in part 2 and I never really felt there was any compelling way to continue the narrative.

Even if I was willing to accept just how much they'd have to pretzel the story to squeeze another go-round out of this series, this still just looks bloody awful.

The actors line readings in that trailer were all terrible. I didn't really like that guy with the bulgy head when he was in PLANET OF THE APES 2, and he feels ten times as much like a tv actor out of his league as John Connor. I don't watch tv, so I don't have a tv crush on that chick from that Lord of the Rings show, so to me her acting just looks terrible. And that Jai Courtney guy continues to somehow get roles.

So yeah, fuck this.

Oh, and here's the poster done in the popular trend of aiming the heroine's ass at the camera.

And I love that Lord of the Rings show you are referring to, and although she's good in it, I wouldn't say she's great (her character is greater then her acting ability). Plus, she showed her hoo-ha's in the first few seasons, then got all uppity about being nude anymore, so she went down a peg as far as I'm concerned.

I knew this was in trouble during the part that was a remake of the department store scene from the first TERMINATOR and then New Sarah Connor crashed in with the "Come with me if you want to live" and I shouted "OH FUCK YOU" really loud at my laptop.

Then Arnold pulled a fucking OLEG move and jumped out of a helicopter and skydived into another helicopter and it exploded and I briefly considered a theatrical viewing of this shit pile.

Everything else looked like a shiny retread of shit we saw in the other movies. Game of Thrones Girl actually kinda looks like Linda Hamilton, so there's that.

Michael Bay's movies trailerize like nobody's business. He always gets tons of really dynamic shots in his movies and so the trailers look great, and they're louder and brighter than whatever came before or after them on tv.

Most of his movies show no ability to build a plot, a character, a scene, or anything really longer than a moment; but moments is all a trailer needs. Every time I see the trailer for one of his movies I get excited and think it looks good and then have to remind myself it's Michael Bay. So I can at least see why he's consistently a king of the box office compared to the mixed success rate of other loud dumb expensive movies.

Spandau Belly wrote:Michael Bay's movies trailerize like nobody's business. He always gets tons of really dynamic shots in his movies and so the trailers look great, and they're louder and brighter than whatever came before or after them on tv.

Most of his movies show no ability to build a plot, a character, a scene, or anything really longer than a moment; but moments is all a trailer needs. Every time I see the trailer for one of his movies I get excited and think it looks good and then have to remind myself it's Michael Bay. So I can at least see why he's consistently a king of the box office compared to the mixed success rate of other loud dumb expensive movies.

Every Frame a Painting wrote:There are filmmakers we love and then there's Michael Bay. Even if you dislike him (as I do), Bay has something valuable to teach us about visual perception. This is an exploration of "Bayhem" — his style of camera movement, composition and editing that creates something overblown, dynamic and distinct.

So there goes and tension in the first film on whether or not Arnold survives. Unless the sequel has yet another Arnold returning from the future. Sigh...

Sorry about the spoiler.

No my comment was aimed at Arnold, not you. I was so looking forward to him giving me the "thumb's up" again as he died heroically, thus showing me that he had really learned what it meant to be human (again).

So there goes and tension in the first film on whether or not Arnold survives. Unless the sequel has yet another Arnold returning from the future. Sigh...

Sorry about the spoiler.

No my comment was aimed at Arnold, not you. I was so looking forward to him giving me the "thumb's up" again as he died heroically, thus showing me that he had really learned what it meant to be human (again).

okaaaay, so this is the a new twist on things, I guess they are releasing such a big spoilerific detail in a trailer in order to get attention as they differentiate from people's preconceptions about plot

They need to go where BACK TO THE FUTURE was afraid to go John is his own father.

I guess at this point the only callbacks they haven't spoiled are when RoboJohn walks by a Victoria's Secret billboard, feels inadequate, and inflates his own breasts; and the part where Reese tells John "You and me are done professionally."

merrick wrote:Considering how poorly promotion for the picture has unfolded thus far, I find this move a bit crass and suspect.

I don't get that. I mean, I'll gladly call myself naive, but considering Cameron basically shit on the previous two sequels, he didn't "have" to like this one. But then, I've been thoroughly intrigued by the story of this new film (not by the shitty CGI....).

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Cameron has never struck me as someone who will lie just to be nice, so I'm inclined to believe that he really does like what he's seen of the new film. But based on how bad the stuff we've seen is, there's definitely a DOES NOT COMPUTE vibe to this news.

I get that everybody's scrambling to find some ulterior motive for Cameron endorsing this movie. He's prettymuch impossible to bribe because he already has everything. This movie isn't even being made by his home studio of Fox, so it's not like he's going to bat for the team. The only thing I could think of is that he is still good friends with Schwarzenegger and is being charitable because he knows Arnie could really use a hit. But honestly, I'm going to take him at face value and believe that he sincerely likes the film ..... and still not bother seeing it myself.

Spandau Belly wrote:I get that everybody's scrambling to find some ulterior motive for Cameron endorsing this movie. He's prettymuch impossible to bribe because he already has everything. This movie isn't even being made by his home studio of Fox, so it's not like he's going to bat for the team. The only thing I could think of is that he is still good friends with Schwarzenegger and is being charitable because he knows Arnie could really use a hit. But honestly, I'm going to take him at face value and believe that he sincerely likes the film ..... and still not bother seeing it myself.

I had the exact same thoughts...I'd wager that Arnold's relationship with Cameron is the reason why he made those silly statements.

headgeek wrote:(NOTE: This review deals with a lot of heavy spoilers for the film - because the results of those spoilers are just fucking insanity that I had to talk about as a Terminator fan. However, if you want no spoilers, know that the film is good spirited fun, is likely to turn you upside down on your head for a bit, and is very definitely the 3rd best in the series behind the two James Cameron films. Now - watch out for spoilers and continue:)

Devin Faraci wrote:Jai Courtney is a disaster as Kyle Reese; he’s wrong in every way, having none of the weary soldier qualities that Michael Biehn brought to the role. Courtney is the new Sam Worthington, who was the new Gretchen Mol, who was the new person whose name I forget because these are forgettable actors foisted upon us by the weird Hollywood hive mind. There are make-up techniques designed to baffle facial recognition software and Jai Courtney seems to have been designed with that in mind - he’s an actor who passes through your brain like a fart in a wind tunnel. Just poof, gone.

Pamela McClintock wrote:Terminator: Genisys — which never expected Jurassic World to still be so strong — placed No. 3 Friday with $10.8 million for an estimated three-day weekend in the $28 million range and five-day debut of roughly $43 million, a poor start that threatens the revival of the storied franchise.

Genisys clearly has far more at stake, considering its $155 million production budget. Paramount and David Ellison's Skydance partnered on the film, which had hoped to at least hit $55 million in its North American launch. Instead, it has been hampered by poor reviews and a B+ CinemaScore.

“I pretty much thought this was an absolutely insane task,” admitted MPC VFX supervisor Sheldon Stopsack when he was first given the assignment. “Digital humans are considered the holy grail in VFX, and then combining that task with such an iconic figure was probably increasing the difficulty by a hundred if not a thousand. [But there was also] a fascination and something appealing to it.”

MPC, which recently worked on Cinderella and X-Men: Days of Future Past among other projects, knew it had to step up its game. “The young Arnold [as he looked in 1984] doesn't exist anymore; he has aged,” Stopsack noted, explaining that they therefore ruled out approaches such as a cyber scan or shooting reference photography of the actor.

The key was research, lots and lots of research. “We started to research what Arnold looked like (and moved like) in 1984; we tried to get our hands on every single piece of footage that we could, [as well as] photography and books. Luckily he was such as iconic figure that he was well documented.” A key reference was also the 1977 bodybuilding docudrama Pumping Iron, which featured Schwarzenegger.

Referencing their research, MPC then started to model the character in the computer. “We were also lucky enough to receive a cast that was taken of him in 1984, which was a great starting point, but it didn't have the detail of a cyber scan that you could get these days,” Stopsack said.

For the facial animation, they used performance capture with SciTech Award-winning system Mova. “Arnold Schwarzenegger made himself available for a performance capture session. He performed the lines,” Stopsack explained.

But he added that for facial expressions or fight shots, performance capture from the actor today probably would not have been anatomically accurate. “His appearance has changed, obviously,” he said. “We set up a library of individual expressions and body movements (based on the research) and associated these with each individual shot. So body movement was hand animated; performance capture was really only used for the dialog.

We had a stunt double, Brett Azar, as a stand in to help with the choreography in the principal photography and we replaced him with a CG version of young Arnold,” Stopsack added.

It's often said that creating active eyes is among the most difficult aspects of work on a CG human. Was it therefore an advantage that the T-800 is a cyborg? "We thought it would be, but the reality is it wasn't," Stopsack said. "As robotic as his character was, there were a lot of subtleties that made Arnold’s performance. [We had to] create it like a human acting like a machine."

“Eyes are a huge part of it," he continued. "At the same time, every other subtlety of the face becomes equally important. If you don't have enough detail in the mouth area or the lips or twitches, the whole character falls apart. … It came down to making sure the subtleties [were there] in all parts of the face and body. If anything was falling behind it was noticeable almost immediately and the character wouldn't be believable anymore.”

Erik Sofge wrote:When Arnold Schwarzenegger's face appears onscreen in Terminator Salvation, it's precisely as it should be: wide, menacing and trapped in 1983. If the first three Terminator films were a flipbook portrait of an action star entering middle age, the fourth installment resets the iconic actor's cinematic clock with a climactic fight scene that blends the latest digital effects with a prosthetic prop that's been shelved for a quarter-century. The result is the resurrection of the killer robot that launched a franchise—and a feat of time travel that's worth the price of admission.

If the cameo has a death mask quality to it, there's a reason—the basis of the digital model wasn't Benjamin Button-esque retrofit of Schwarzenegger's present-day face, but a life mask created in 1983 by Stan Winston Studios. "We dug out our original cast from the first Terminator movie, and created a new, cleaned-up, properly textured life-size bust," says John Rosengrant, the animatronics and special makeup effects supervisor for Terminator Salvation. Rosengrant has worked on all of the Terminator movies, and his company, Legacy Effects, is essentially a renamed version of Stan Winston Studios (the name is a reference to Winston, the legendary visual effects wizard who died last year). Although Salvation director McG told the Los Angeles Daily News that "it's the Schwarzenegger created from the scans from the first picture," Rosengrant points out that taking 3D scans wasn't an option 25 years ago, when the state-of-the-art in prosthetics required building a cast of Arnold's head out of dental alginate. Along with that vintage lifemask, Legacy had inherited extensive photographic reference of Schwarzenegger from 1983, taken to help Winston's team recreate accurate details (such as eyebrows, hair and skin tone).

Rosengrantz sent those photos, as well as castings taken of the new bust his team created, to Industrial Light & Magic, which handled the movie's digital effects. That period-accurate reference, he believes, helped create a visual that's as effective as it is unnerving. "I was trained as more of a traditional artist, and sculptor, and portraiture is always about the sum of the parts and the details," Rosengrant says. "If you don't have everything landing in the right place, any mistakes become monumental. And that becomes magnified when you're dealing with a face that's as recognizable as Arnold's."

This combination of traditional and computer-generated effects is more clear-cut in some of the movie's other robots, such as the T-600 android, an even bulkier predecessor to the bodybuilder-size T-800. Legacy created a fully animatronic, 7-ft. 4-in. T-600 for some shots, as well as a costume that featured blue-screened sections, which ILM turned into see-though gaps in the robot's clothing and rubbery flesh. Rosengrant's team also used blue-screen strips in Marcus Wright's (Sam Worthington) makeup, again allowing metallic components to be digitally inserted. But in a movie full of new, lethal robots, from swimming, insectoid "hydro-bots" to a towering humanoid model that stuffs humans into an airborne cattle car, it's the return of the T-800 that inspires real dread. That Arnold's Cold War-era face doesn't utter a word is all the better—science fiction's best impression of the Grim Reaper is back. And, for once, he doesn't have to announce it.